Victor Burgin: Young Oaks
ISBN: 978-1-7355856-1-1
Victor Burgin: Young Oaks November 13 – December 19, 2020
CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY 219 BOWERY, FLOOR 2, NEW YORK, NY 10002
A Note on Young Oaks Victor Burgin
In 2016 I was invited by the Italian scholar and publisher Gabriele Guercio to contribute to a series of artists’ books on the common theme of the “afterlife.” My response to the project subsequently outgrew the proposed “limited edition” format and was eventually published in 2019 by Thomas Zander/Walther König as Afterlife. The book—which also exists in web-based form—consists of passages of images and texts orbiting the core premise of a parallel world in which technology provides perfect digital copies of individual minds: “Once the duplicate is made, there are effectively two beings: one organic, the other numeric. Each evolves separately but only one will die.”1 The science fiction scenario serves as an allegory of ordinary everyday life understood as a continual work of transaction between material reality and the virtual realities of memory, fantasy and computer simulations. I conceived of Afterlife as an open project to be expanded upon in further works that function both independently and as satellites of the original premise. My book mandarin, published concurrently with Afterlife by Guercio’s Juxta Press, was the first of these. My gallery work Young Oaks is the second. Young Oaks elaborates upon a passing evocation in Afterlife of the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. In 2008 the Royal Academy of Arts, London, mounted an exhibition of Hammershøi’s work. Walking through the Royal Academy galleries I could imagine myself circling the artist’s Copenhagen apartment. The experience remained with me and I included an image in Afterlife to represent my memory in the form of a view down an enfilade of rooms with light from windows casting patterns on the floor. In common with all but one of the other images in Afterlife the view of the rooms was made with a virtual camera in a set constructed using a “game engine.”2 For Young Oaks I expanded my set into a suite of four interconnecting rooms, elaborating upon their architectural details and furnishings, and placing them in a landscape setting. The passage between rooms is described in four pairs of superposed images, each pair forming a shot/countershot from one room into the next. Two additional diptychs reveal objects that in the other image pairs are concealed in blind spots behind doors. These objects also appear in the pages of Afterlife. The suite of six diptychs is completed by a brief framed text citing a haiku by Richard Wright.3 I derive the title of my work from the title of Hammershøi’s 1907 painting Young Oak Trees, which I’ve placed in an interior based on Hammershøi’s apartment as it appears in his paintings and in contemporary photographs. The framed painting on the wall of my virtual interior has its counterpart – another form of countershot – in a framed text on the wall of the gallery that completes the suite of diptychs. The text is composed of two citations: The first of these is the last line of this passage from my text/image book Afterlife: Books and a reading lamp beside an armchair. On a desk more books a pile of papers and a computer. 1
Victor Burgin, Afterlife, Cologne, Thomas Zander/Walther König, 2019, unpaginated. Web-based version (Chrome on desktop only) at https://afterlife.victorburgin.eu/
2
3D modelling software for the design of videogames.
3
Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World, New York, Arcade, 1998, p. 170, Verse 679.
He is at a window, looking across the dimly lit street. A woman in a house opposite begins to read. The second citation is from a book of Haiku by Richard Wright. The source of the citations is not identified in the work on the wall. Footnotes belong to a different discursive space – for example, that of the academic essay – and Richard Wright the man is not part of the content of my work. Wright’s book however is displayed in an annex to the exhibition space, open at the page with the haiku I cite, together with my own book Afterlife and my related book mandarin. Young Oak Trees was painted in 1907 and exhibited in Copenhagen the following year. The Hammershøi scholar Poul Vad sees the work as evidence of the emerging influence of classical Chinese and Japanese art upon a legacy of landscape painting inherited from German Romanticism. Works of art imply ways of being in the world. Young Oak Trees was first shown in the year the first works of Analytical Cubism were exhibited in Paris. Despite their apparent dissimilarities Hammershøi’s paintings and those of his Cubist contemporaries are equally attempts to represent a phenomenological real. The French semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes observes that the real is not representable, but that writers have nevertheless ceaselessly tried to put it into words. The succession of their failures has given us the history of literature.4 I might say much the same of the “visual” artworks that interest me most. They may vary in historical period and in appearance, but I sense in them a common relation to the phenomenological real, a common way of being in the world. This “real” is not to be confused with the consensual “reality” assumed by common sense and mainstream media. In the works that engage me, formal invention serves to circumvent the pre-formatted versions of reality that impose the boundaries of what may be thought and said – a pre-formatting encountered as often in works of art as in popular sitcoms and soap operas. Analytical Cubism fragmented a previously unitary pictorial field into disparate views from multiple points in real space. Concurrently, such thinkers as Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud described the geometry of psychical space by dismantling previously categorical distinctions between “inner” and “outer” reality, “memory” and “fantasy.” Whereas the focus of Hammershøi and the early Cubists is upon material reality, my own attention is primarily on the fragmentary and shifting phenomena of what Freud terms “psychical reality.” Young Oaks elaborates upon an image from Afterlife which stands in for a memory now inseparable from other memories, fantasies and associations. It contributes to a “realist” project that, as I remarked in concluding an essay of 1987: … cannot be what it was at the time of Gustave Courbet, or even Bertolt Brecht. Attention to psychical reality calls for a psychical realism – impossible, but nevertheless …5 4
Roland Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology,” Collège de France, January 7, 1977, October, vol. 8, Spring, 1979, p. 8.
5
Victor Burgin, ”Geometry and Abjection” [1987] in, In/Different Spaces, Berkeley / Los Angeles, University of California, 1996, p. 56. See also, Alexander Streitberger, Psychical Realism: The Work of Victor Burgin, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2020.
Young Oaks, 2020 Series of six diptychs and one text panel, 13 archival inkjet prints mounted on Dibond each diptych: 39 3/4 x 25 1/4 inches (101 x 64 cm) text panel: 9 1/2 x 12 5/8 inches (24 x 32 cm) Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Wright’s book is displayed in an annex to the exhibition space, open at the page with the haiku I cite, together with my own book Afterlife and my related book mandarin. Burgin, A Note on Young Oaks
Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the originators of Conceptual Art. His work appeared in such key exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969) at the ICA London, and Kynaston McShine’s Information (1970) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions at the Museum für Gegenwartkunst Siegen, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, MAMCO Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Mücsarnok Museum, University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Musée d’art moderne Villeneuve d’Ascq, The List Visual Arts Center, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Musée de la Ville de Calais, The Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. His work appears in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, Walker Art Center, Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum Ludwig, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Musée national d’art moderne, Sammlung Falckenberg, and The Arts Council Collection in London. Burgin graduated from the School of Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1965, where his teachers included the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, and then went on to study Philosophy and Fine Art at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where his teachers included Robert Morris and Donald Judd. Burgin is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Southampton, Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. In 2015 he was a Mellon Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He lives and works in South West France and Paris.
Cristin Tierney Gallery 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY 10002 212.594.0550 www.cristintierney.com